Nordlandsbanen: minute by minute, season by season

Beautiful skies over the Nordlandsbanen, when we recorded the journey 23 February 2012. Photo: Sindre Skrede/NRK

The article and all pictures used are licensed under Creative Commons, you can use all of it or parts of it in whatever way you find suitable, as long as you attribute it with the following text and clickable link to this page:

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) has made another spectacular minute by minute documentary, this time recording Norway’s northenmost railway linking Trondheim and Bodø. We’ve recorded it four times — once for every season, giving truly unique footage of this ten hour ride.

You can watch it on the web, but we have also made everything available for you to download in full HD — and licensed it with Creative Commons so that you can edit, remix and share!

This is an example of what you can make with these files:

The Nordland Railway (‘Nordlandsbanen’ in Norwegian) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The railway is 729 kilometers long, and passes thorugh spectacular scenery, varying from the fjord area around Trondheim in the south, through beautiful valleys, over mountains and along fjords before crossing the Arctic Circle at Saltfjellet and descending down to the coastal city of Bodø.

Recordings from both winter, spring, summer and autumn makes for pretty scenes such as this.

Following the success of the world’s longest live documentary, Hurtigruten minute by minute, the Telemak Canal and Bergensbanen minute by minute, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation set out to film the Nordland Railway as well. This time, though, we had to think up a way to show the contrasts one can encounter along the route; the weather, colours and climatic conditions.

The solution was to film the journey once every season, to show the different weather conditions and the great changes in nature’s expression from summer to authumn, and winter to spring.

The Nordlandsbanen passes through spectacular landscape. This is a freeze frame from the television programme.

We have thus recorded the journey four times, with the idea of combining the four seasons in both a regular, 10 hour long, TV documentary, and a version for web where the audience can mix their own version. Let us show you an example of the result:

Recording

The recording was done using a SonyXDcam, placed in the front of the Di. 4 locomotives used on Nordlandsbanen. In addition we used Canon XF 302 for some side view-shots and interviews, in addition to GoPro Hero 2 and a Sony Handycam for some effect shots.

Since NSB Di. 4 is a rather unstable camera platform with a lot of vibrations, we used a special image stabilizing lens from Canon, with the very cryptial name of HJ15ex8.5B KRSE-V. For aerial shots, during the summer, we used NRK’s own Cineflex V14.

Thomas Hellum og Jon Ståle Carlsen from NRK mounts the forward-facing camera before the recording of winter along the Nordlandsbanen, 23 February 2012. Photo: Sindre Skrede/NRK

Syncing the files

Even though the Norwegian State Railway managed to keep the schedule on each of our recorded trips, the four journeys differed in position at any given time. The train will, for example, not enter a station at the exact same second in both June and March, and cannot keep the exact same speed at all times. In other words, we had to synchronize the video files in order to make the train appear to be at the same place at the same time in every video stream.

The GPS position of the train was logged continuously on each trip, with an interval of 1 Hz. Deciding to use the summer clip as the master, we used Microsoft Excel to interpolate the GPS data to 25 Hz, to match the video frame rate of 25 frames per second. This 25 Hz GPS data was then written to a PostgreSQL database.

We then wrote a script which asked the database to give us the time for when each of the other seasons were at the same position as the Summer recording. This gave us a long list of time codes, near 36 000. Using Adobe After Effects, we were then able to manipulate the speed of the winter, autumn and spring-recordings with the effect «time remap», to match the speed and position of the summer recording.

This is a screenshot of the autumn recording before we adjust it to match the speed of the summer recording. We see that the time is linear, meaning one frame in = one frame out. There is also only two keyframes: at the start and the end of the video. Adobe After Effects enables us to copy the keyframe data as plain text, and if we do that, this is what we end up with:

The data of interest here is the values under «frame» and «seconds». Frame denotes which frame number is the keyframe, and seconds denotes what time in the recorded video that is to be shown at that specific frame.

You might have noticed we use 90 frames per second, as opposed to the original 25 that we recorded. Adobe After Effects does not support time lines over three hours, but does, however, support up to 99,99 frames per second. By speeding up the video, we are able to keep our time line under three hours, and avoid splitting our recording over several time lines.

What we need to do is tell After Effects when to slow down and when to speed up the recording. Using the position data we created earlier, we can generate new keyframes:

(Originally this creates over 32000 lines, so we have shortened the list substantially.)

Having pasted the new keyframes, our timeline will look like this:

Time still goes on, but in this case it has over over 32 000 keyframes telling After Effects when to stop (horizontal lines) or jump (vertical lines) in time.

Rendering the three, time remapped seasons took over 20 hours each. They were still 90 frames per second, however, but using Apple Cinema Tools we were able to stretch this back to the original 25 frames per second — without another round of rendering.

The result can be seen below: we are able to run the four seasons at the same speed, giving the impression that the train is at the same place at the same time.

Beautiful skies over the Nordlandsbanen, when we recorded the journey 23 February 2012. Photo: Sindre Skrede/NRK

Just like we shared Bergensbanen, Flåmsbanen, Holmenkollbanen, Telemarkskanalen, and the 134 hour long Hurtigruten minute by minute-programmes, we do of course share the Nordlandsbanen as well. We give you all four seasons, already synchronised, in addition to the GPS data for each trip. The files can be downloaded via BitTorrent:

[…] this year, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (or the NRK to the locals) has created an epic ten hour documentary capturing the country’s northernmost railway route that connects the cities of Trondheim and […]

[…] this year, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (or the NRK to the locals) has created an epic ten hour documentary capturing the country’s northernmost railway route that connects the cities of Trondheim and […]

[…] this year, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (or the NRK to the locals) has created an epic ten hour documentary capturing the country’s northernmost railway route that connects the cities of Trondheim and […]

[…] this year, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (or the NRK to the locals) has created an epic ten hour documentary capturing the country’s northernmost railway route that connects the cities of Trondheim and […]

[…] The article and all pictures used are licensed under Creative Commons, you can use all of it or parts of it in whatever way you find suitable, as long as you attribute it with the following text and clickable link to this page: Content licensed under… […]

I am an enthusiast of photo and video (including editing) and I always loved to arrange meta-information and creativity. Several years before the age of smartphone, I created a geo-tagging method based on excel and excel macros to embed the GPS position in my photos.

For this, I can understand the value of your work. And the fun you guys had finding out the ways to overcome the editing and data management issues.

Thanks for sharing not only the artistic result, but also the work behind it!

[…] The company states, “The Nordland Railway (‘Nordlandsbanen’ in Norwegian) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The railway is 729 kilometers long, and passes thorugh spectacular scenery, varying from the fjord area around Trondheim in the south, through beautiful valleys, over mountains and along fjords before crossing the Arctic Circle at Saltfjellet and descending down to the coastal city of Bodø.” […]

[…] The company states, “The Nordland Railway (‘Nordlandsbanen’ in Norwegian) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The railway is 729 kilometers long, and passes thorugh spectacular scenery, varying from the fjord area around Trondheim in the south, through beautiful valleys, over mountains and along fjords before crossing the Arctic Circle at Saltfjellet and descending down to the coastal city of Bodø.” […]

Giulia L.

Hello, this is simply great!
I have read about the documentary on the newspaper, and showed the short video to my son (a 5-years-old train maniac) and now he wants to see the whole footage! Hours and hours! I’ve explained that it would take many hours to see it all, ’till bedtime, so he’s said: «Then mama please wake me up early tomorrow so I can start right away and make it in one day!» :-DD
Train-maniacs aside, I’ve found the videos enthralling too! Beautiful idea!

The reason is that the trips from the winter, spring and fall have been time remapped to match the summer trip. If You are interested in the original, recordings with audio, they can be downloaded from the links found at the bottom of this article: nrkbeta.no/2012/11/30/julekalender-nordlandsbanen

[…] NRK recorded the 10-hour train ride on the Nordland Railway to Nordlandsbanen, from Trondheim across the artic circle, to Bodø; once per season, and mashed all the footage together to simulate a time lapse video. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. This entry was posted in Cool Findings, Videos and tagged Nordland Railway, NRK. Bookmark the permalink. […]

[…] is awesome. And almost as impressive as the video is the details on how they made it. You can read more about it here but the level of effort they put in to matching the position of the train and time stamps to ensure […]

[…] NRK take us on a journey of Nordlandsbanen, from Trondheim across the artic circle, to Bodø, watch the entire 10 hours, learn how they made it, download source footage, remix and participate over at NRK. […]

Hi, first of all thanks for creating and publishing these great videos.

I wonder if you can help me associating the lines from the GPS data files with the videos. That is, I want to know which frame in the synchronized video belongs to which line in the GPS data file. I suppose this information can be retrieved from the frame-to-seconds associations you used for the keyframe synchronization. Maybe you could make those available too?

Tusen takk!

Why am I asking?
I am a researcher at a university and we have lately been using your synchronized videos in our research on life-long autonomy for robots in changing environments. We try to find algorithms that can learn to predict how an environment changes over time (e.g. during the seasons). If you are interested in what we do with your data, you can check out our papers from my website, e.g. this one tu-chemnitz.de/etit/proaut/mitarbeiter/rsrc/ECMR13_ACP.pdf

if You manage to match the position of one of the lines to the original GPS log, You will find the time offset. Remember to use the summer track, since that is that is the master that the other seasons are mapped to.

There are some weird pauses in the GPS data (or hops in the time stamps). For example at record 62 the timestamp jumps from 5385900 to 5390000, which is a 4000/100 second hop. However the distance between GPS coordinates does not show any slowing down or speeding up of the train, and there is no pause in the video. Also in the synchronized video there is nothing weird to be seen at this point (crossing Nidelv bru).

Also, at the end of the data there is 1123 additional records (starting at record 32853, good for ca 20 km in to Bodø) which seem to be from another trainride. (Also with a 790800/100 second = 2h+ time hop.)

[…] is awesome. And almost as impressive as the video is the details on how they made it. You can read more about it here but the level of effort they put in to matching the position of the train and time stamps to ensure […]

Peter

There are some weird pauses in the GPS data (or hops in the time stamps). For example at record 62 the timestamp jumps from 5385900 to 5390000, which is a 4000/100 second hop. However the distance between GPS coordinates does not show any slowing down or speeding up of the train, and there is no pause in the video. Also in the synchronized video there is nothing weird to be seen at this point (crossing Nidelv bru).

Also, at the end of the data there is 1123 additional records (starting at record 32853, good for ca 20 km in to Bodø) which seem to be from another trainride. (Also with a 790800/100 second = 2h+ time hop.)

First, thank you both for making these videos and making them available for download. I have put edited versions of the summer video on youtube. I have added station, tunnel and bridge names. I also elimated waits at red signals and longer station stops.

I am now downloading the synchronised Winter video (14.3 GB), in order to test if it has sound on my computer, and if there are any problems playing it. I’ll let you know when I have tested it.

Generally speaking: The ability to play video files does not depend so much on which player you use, as on which video codecs you have installed on your computer. In order to play most video files with good result, you should download and install the latest K-Lite Codec Pack Full, for instance from this site:codecguide.com/download_k-lite_codec_pack_full.htm
Be careful when you install it, read everything on each step of the installation, so that you don’t install any unwanted programs at the same time!

KIM

First, thank you both for making these videos and making them available for download.
But where can I get the details about camera’s calibration parameter(such as:principal point&focal length)?
Thank you~

Do you guys have the un-retimed and/or camera original files available? There are a lot of pretty bad motion artifacts in the synced versions.

I’m a long-time After Effects user and would like to attempt to do my own re-timing. I suspect there are way too many keyframes used and that the GPS data may not have given you great data all of the time – especially coming out of tunnels. Hand-matching and using velocity curves combined with Pixel Motion blending would give much better results (though with days-long renderings).